Gender Discrimination in Education: What motivates parents to invest more in sons?

Tara Kaul ()
Additional contact information
Tara Kaul: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation

No 3305588, Proceedings of International Academic Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences

Abstract: Gender discrimination exists in many different forms, and in many different countries and contexts. A wide body of empirical evidence suggests the existence and persistence of gender discrimination within the household. Boys receive preferential treatment from parents in terms of health and educational inputs. In this paper I map out and examine the existence and extent of gender discrimination in India among school going children (ages 4-18) and compare outcomes based on different types of household heterogeneities, such as size, income, location etc. I use child-specific data on enrolment and educational expenditures incurred for all children in the household, thereby making comparison both within and across households.While the male bias exists in both the decision to enrol a child in school, and in the amount of money spent on their books, tuition etc, parents particularly favour first born children. Households in urban areas, and those that have fewer children tend to discriminate less in favour of boys. It also striking that as the number of children increases, parents have higher expectations of financial support in the future from their sons, suggesting that this expectation may be exacerbating the preferential treatment to boys.

Keywords: education; gender discrimination; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D19 I24 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 1 page
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 21st International Academic Conference, Miami, Mar 2016, pages 100-100

Downloads: (external link)
https://iises.net/proceedings/21st-international-a ... =33&iid=019&rid=5588 First version, 2016

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sek:iacpro:3305588

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of International Academic Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klara Cermakova ().